I was wondering if the definitions of Av was 1000 000 does that means that this Av contains 1000 000 known viruses in its database or it means something else ???
Yah that should be it^^
-AnimeLover^^
This just means virus analysts added 1.000.000 separated signatures to detect malware. However, when involving generic signatures, each generic signature can detect undefined number of known variants. So 1.000.000 can mean it can detect 1.000.000 different pieces of malware (for sure) or more (this value cannot ever be correctly predicted). And we weren’t even counting heuristic detections and upcoming behavioral detections which cannot be really counted, but they can detect hundreds or thousands of unknown or modified known pieces of malware.
You also have to understand that these numbers aren’t compatible between different security vendors because each counts in it’s own way. So, number of signatures for BitDefender cannot be compared directly to avast! number of signatures.
And this also means if BitDefender has 5.000.000 signatures (fictional value) and avast! only 1.000.000 (also fictional number), this doesn’t automatically mean avast! is worse than BitDefender. It just means they are counting the signatures in a different way.
One company can count each family signature eg. Mytob-a, Mytob-B, Mytob-C as three separate signatures and another just as one signature (Mytob family), even though they detect them under different variants separately.
in the avast 4.8 was about 240 000 virus
in avast 5 was about 1 967 944
and avast 4.8 detect as 5"of course avast 5 has better technology and heuristic"
Whoa really surprising!!!
But how did you know for avast 4.8?
Easy really, by checking the virus database, search on * (wildcard) shows results for all signatures, see image. Unfortunately the text states viruses, but as we know that should be definitions as generic signatures/definitions can detect multiple virus variants.